4 ms·

The scary part here is that I am not actually sure whether this is fiction or not.

by petetnt 10y ago

junke 10y ago
> Founded in 2004 by Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF is your how-not-to guide for developing software. We recount tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices. Remy Porter is the editor-in-chief and needs to read your story or see your bad code. And below: > Submit Your WTF Stories are not supposed to be fiction. Granted, editors can't check how true what you submit is (and often, you only have one side of the story), but there seems to be so much available material out there that we don't need fictional entries.
- douche 10y ago
  At one point, I believe they released a Visual Studio extension that would let you highlight a particularly WTF-worthy chunk of code and post it up easily. I was tempted with some of the code that I inherited after it had gone through a couple iterations of cut-rate outsourced freelancers...
Jean-Philipe 10y ago
Same here. The other stories do seem real though. A friend of mine once worked at a software company as recently as 2014 (it went bankrupt meanwhile) where the team of around 10 developers would work without any versioning system at all! They used folders with dates instead, and every once in a while someone would go over all the folders with the respective developer and merge the code manually. My friend tried to introduce SVN, but the developers didn't want to invest time into learning it. Anyway, given the stories I know first-hand, I totally believe it's a true story!
- baybal2 10y ago
  In Russia, we had people running in between desks with stacks of floppy disks and flash drives up until mid 200\
plorkyeran 10y ago
Both. In the interest of anonymizing submissions and just ensuring things read well, they basically take the submissions and write a new framing story for the core WTF from the submission. In this case the names, dialogue, specific details given about the system are probably all fabricated, but the idea of assembling classes out of revisions in a source control system and not supporting comments would be from the original submission.
WorldMaker 10y ago
The general assumption when reading the Daily WTF has always been that the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but the facts and mistakes are very real.

The scary part here is that I am not actually sure whether this is fiction or not.

by petetnt 10y ago

The scary part here is that I am not actually sure whether this is fiction or not.

junke 10y ago

> Founded in 2004 by Alex Papadimoulis, The Daily WTF is your how-not-to guide for developing software. We recount tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices. Remy Porter is the editor-in-chief and needs to read your story or see your bad code. And below: > Submit Your WTF Stories are not supposed to be fiction. Granted, editors can't check how true what you submit is (and often, you only have one side of the story), but there seems to be so much available material out there that we don't need fictional entries.

douche 10y ago
At one point, I believe they released a Visual Studio extension that would let you highlight a particularly WTF-worthy chunk of code and post it up easily. I was tempted with some of the code that I inherited after it had gone through a couple iterations of cut-rate outsourced freelancers...

Jean-Philipe 10y ago

Same here. The other stories do seem real though. A friend of mine once worked at a software company as recently as 2014 (it went bankrupt meanwhile) where the team of around 10 developers would work without any versioning system at all! They used folders with dates instead, and every once in a while someone would go over all the folders with the respective developer and merge the code manually. My friend tried to introduce SVN, but the developers didn't want to invest time into learning it. Anyway, given the stories I know first-hand, I totally believe it's a true story!

baybal2 10y ago
In Russia, we had people running in between desks with stacks of floppy disks and flash drives up until mid 200\

plorkyeran 10y ago

Both. In the interest of anonymizing submissions and just ensuring things read well, they basically take the submissions and write a new framing story for the core WTF from the submission. In this case the names, dialogue, specific details given about the system are probably all fabricated, but the idea of assembling classes out of revisions in a source control system and not supporting comments would be from the original submission.

WorldMaker 10y ago

The general assumption when reading the Daily WTF has always been that the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but the facts and mistakes are very real.